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Only connect…

Progress throws up some startling images, and for my money this is one of them. It’s a 26-storey pig farm and slaughterhouse in Hubei, China. In the supply-and-demand scheme of things it’s probably a very reasonable development. It makes good use of technological and engineering capacity, provides for cost-efficient protein production, and could be said to have an environmentally friendly footprint compared with more land-intensive ways of growing pork. But something jars, doesn’t it? Like a sourness in the viscera. Something’s not right, and it feels like a sign. A sign, I suggest, of catastrophic disconnection.

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The Cost of Living

The cost of living is determined by affordability and availability.  When we say energy, food, or housing are affordable we mean that the prices charged for energy, food, or housing are within the range we can afford to pay. The amount we can afford to pay depends on how much we earn. So, first off, the cost of living is dependent on affordability, which in turn is related to access to jobs and the rate we are paid to perform a service.  Affordability isn’t directly measured by availability, but if a product isn’t easily available the price will be higher. So indirectly, affordability does relate to availability. Economics has long taught that supply and demand determine the pricing of goods and services. If supply is low, the price will be high. Continue reading “The Cost of Living”

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Down at the dell

A luminous void for sky, not quite white and not quite grey. Wind, and a spattering of rain. A shiny gloss on the leaves, long yearned for. And a picture-perfect setting, down here, where the trail bottoms out.

Here is where the stream emerges briefly from a tangle and pauses alongside a great, gnarly, dragon-headed log, before wandering off into further tangles. The water is still, clear and shallow; the mud-bank reddish-brown.

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Standing at the edge of change

The world’s population of humans stands at the edge of rapid change and the future appears unimaginable. The greatest challenge (and danger) we face is climate change. We are faced with the undeniable fact that if we don’t stop adding green house gas emissions to the atmosphere our planet is going to overheat and the consequences are already catastrophic. In order to stop emitting green house gases we need to stop burning fossil fuels, hopefully replacing our energy needs with renewable sources. Continue reading “Standing at the edge of change”

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Ingredient X

I

I’ve been wondering for a while about Ingredient X. As in, the part of us, this human animal, that marks us out from the others.

You know all those “humans are the only species to…” (use language / make war / get high / mourn our dead / have the capacity to blow ourselves up / know God / laugh-cry-blush etc.) pronouncements? Most have been overtaken by zoological findings but new ones are continually being minted (…explore space / enjoy extreme sports / watch Bridgerton etc. etc.) What they have in common is an (insecure?) assumption that something very special separates us from the rest of creation.

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On Kandiaronk (The Rat): A Review of The Dawn of Everything

It is revolutionary, intellectually-speaking, to point out that the European Enlightenment –  especially the suite of political ideals (liberty, equality, democracy)) that are still aspirational for most societies – was inspired by early European encounters with indigenous/native American thinkers.  This is the argument that David Wengrow and the late David Graeber make in the first chapters of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity; tracing Enlightenment ideas about liberty to  the interactions of French colonial military commanders with the great Wendat (Huron) leader and thinker Kandiaronk. It is the earth-shaking first chess move in the argument that Graeber and Wengrow build throughout the rest of the book, an argument that aims to show that the conventional Western theories of the “general course of human history”: 

1. Simply arenʻt true;

2. Have dire political implications;

3. Make the past needlessly dull. Continue reading “On Kandiaronk (The Rat): A Review of The Dawn of Everything”

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A totally absurd, utterly impractical wish-list for 2022

#1 Scrap nukes

Why? Ballistic-missile-delivered nuclear warheads are the biggest, fastest, meanest weapons ever, and today there are thousands of them locked in each other’s crosshairs all around the globe. It wouldn’t take much – an unforeseen system failure, a geopolitical miscalculation, a rush of blood to the head of some incompetent nationalist military-political leader – for all hell to be let loose.

Why not? They keep the peace, don’t they? Ukraine relinquished its USSR-legacy nuclear weapons in 1994, under pressure from all sides, and look what it’s facing now. Taiwan was forced to terminate its own nuclear programme in the 1980s and might be in a more robust position today if it hadn’t. Honestly, which world-bestriding military power in 2022 would feel more secure without its nuclear arsenal?

Yeah, but… weapons are made to be used, and a horrible logic dictates that The Bomb will once again be brought into play, humans being what they are when they have too much power at their disposal. Also, manmade systems designed to prevent accidental launch are, like everything else in the universe, subject to Murphy’s Law. Whether triggered deliberately or not, the planet as we know it simply won’t survive an escalating outbreak of nuclear attack and counterattack.

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Who says there’s no such thing as free will?

Who says there’s no such thing as free will? Quite a few people, it turns out. Philosophers, scientists and best-selling public intellectuals, some with real sway.

“This sort of free will [such as choosing between an apple or a banana from the fruit bowl] is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics” says an evolutionary biologist quoted in this considered article by Oliver Burkeman.

The article offers a scan of the field and comes down in favour of a more nuanced understanding of what free will entails. And it got me wondering, because underlying assumptions about what we are and are not capable of deciding and doing must have a big bearing on how we – as individuals and as a global community – relate and respond to cascading environmental breakdown. If we truly live in a clockwork universe, absent free will, then why sweat it?

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There’s something about seagulls

Here on the Bristol Channel, the sound of late summer and early autumn this year has been the relentless whistle-squeak of young seagulls demanding sustenance from their parents and/or being playful.

I’ve been watching the town seagulls – they’re herring gulls, I believe – for a few years now. They are immaculately turned-out, opportunistic, and tremendously graceful on the wing. Like urban foxes, pigeons and the rest they have adapted cannily to urban life and human ubiquity, but unlike those other creatures they are not shy about asserting their authority and voicing their opinion of us. They are loudmouthed and pugnacious and will not be ignored.

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